Monthly Archives: July 2007

Fighting Green Card Injustice With Green Kindness

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Gandhigiri.jpg

Many of you commented or left news tips about the plan to give flowers to USCIS director Emilio Gonzalez, as a form of peaceful protest against the ridiculously unfair green card debacle. Approximately two hundred bouquets were sent. WaPo covers Gandhigiri:

They did it because that’s what Gandhi would have done.
Yesterday, their bouquets of purple roses, pink lilies and yellow daisies, which cost about $40 each and which were sent from all over the country, piled up on the immigration office’s loading dock at 20 Massachusetts Ave. NW, addressed to Gonzalez and stacked in columns taller than people.
The agency forwarded them to soldiers recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“We know the reason behind it and understand the symbolism. We donated them in the same spirit in which they were provided to us,” said an agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lawsuit over the matter filed by an advocacy group.

Background, for any who missed it:

Green card applicants were given hope on June 12, when the State Department posted a bulletin offering H1B visa holders who had been stuck in a bureaucratic logjam an opportunity to take that last step needed to apply for permanent residency.
Thousands of engineers, doctors and other educated foreigners began a mad scramble to file their applications before the July 2 deadline.
Vacations were canceled, and lawyers were called in. Elderly parents in far-flung corners of the world stood in line for hours to get copies of birth certificates and immunization records.
Then, on the day of the deadline, the State Department retracted the bulletin. The USCIS, which processes the applications, said it had already met its 140,000-person annual quota for employee-sponsored applicants.

Continue reading →

Beats, Rhymes, and Life-July 19th, Houston

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A few weeks back when Anna wrote about D.C.’s Subcontinental Drift, a series of spoken word and performing arts events featuring South Asians in the D.C. area, I mentioned in the comments that I was going to borrow (ok, steal) their idea and implement it down in good ‘ole Texas where there is also a growing arts community. Well now it’s on, just like that:

Houston has many South Asian artists, musicians, and other creative individuals who never seem to get the type of attention that their counterparts in New York, L.A., and D.C. receive. This summer it’s time to change all that. Join us on Thursday, July 19th from 8:30-11:00 p.m. at the new downtown venue “Bar Bollywood“ (basement of the Butterfly High Lounge) for a FREE night of Spoken Word, Live Music, and Visual Arts. DJ Raj Swift will also be on hand to lay down the backbeat.

If you are an artist of any kind and want to perform (especially a spoken word, literary, or dance piece) or just want more information, then email abhi [at] sepiamutiny.com ASAP.

Although this event is meant to spotlight South Asian artists, ALL are welcome and encouraged to attend. Spread the word.

Finally, Roopa Vasan will be on hand to cheek swab people for the South Asian Bone Marrow Registry in hopes of finding a match to save her cousin Vinay’s life.

Bar Bollywood
902 Capitol Street
Houston, TX 77002

Please let anyone you know in or around Houston know about this if you think it would interest them. Hope to see you there. Continue reading →

Another “Isolated” Incident of Infanticide.

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A few days ago, I wrote a surprisingly controversial post about a baby girl who had been buried alive, in Andhra Pradesh. Stupid me, I thought everyone would find such news abhorrent. But, in a shocking and to some, sickening twist, it would seem that condemning infanticide is wrong because it is more important to engage in the worst sort of cultural relativism.

Disagreeing with a man’s choice to bury his newborn granddaughter alive would be Western and especially Feminist stupidity. Are you perplexed? Wondering what I am going on about? Ah, then enjoy the following amuse bouche of comments from a few lurkers and readers, which that post inspired:

Dont get carried away by sensationalism
Everyone has it bad in India. you’re the only one who choose to single out the plight of women and measure it by YOUR western standards. It MUST be measured by Indian standards, i.e. the plight of Indian men, children, grandpas, grandmas, the whole society. Everyone has it bad in India, not just little girls.
just don’t forget, we live in the West, lets not judge everything by Western standards…If they want to kill their girl babies because girls mean one less hand to till the soil (by hand, of course), that is their buisness.
Poor people will do anything to survive. As long as its their family, and not anyone else’s, no one has a right to interfere.
you, possessing such a craving for attention, would rather start a thread focused on a single baby, a TOTALLY isolated incident, just so you can feel better!

Yes, I felt much better after that depressing thread, especially after I naively attempted to offer a counterpoint to it while proving that feminism can be a desi concept, too. As one of you said via email, after wading through comment-sewage, “I can’t believe there is so much misogyny and so little outrage here.”

::

Isolated. I thought of all those apologist quotes when I read the story which MasterVK was alert enough to submit to our news tab earlier today, about another newborn baby girl, who was also found and rescued:

AHMEDABAD: Her feeble cries help almost drowned in the din of the heavy downpour near Kankaria lake on Monday. Until a fireman found the newborn baby shivering in the rain, abandoned mercilessly without a piece of clothing on her body!
The child’s cries had gone unheard for hours and she had turned pale, lying in the incessant rains, near Kankaria lake. The baby was found by a team of firemen led by Rajesh Goswami who heard the faint cries early in the morning when they embarked on duty to check the oxygen levels in the lake.
Instead of the fish, the firemen found the freshly delivered girl who was dumped from the womb straight into the lake to die. “The girl did not have any clothing on her and had turned completely white. We had become sceptical about her survival,” said Goswami.

Continue reading →

Pakistan’s Military Storms Islamabad’s Red Mosque

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Lal Masjid stormed.jpg

Early this morning in Islamabad, the week-long stand-off at Lal Masjid between radical militants and Pakistani security forces worsened. Via The Times Online:

Heavy smoke drifted over the mosque complex yesterday, only a few miles from the presidential palace and the parliament building. Gunfire and explosions thundered across the city as the codenamed Operation Silence unfolded. At times it seemed as if the entire complex was being flattened.
About 70 militants and 12 soldiers died in the fighting. Among the dead was Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the firebrand cleric who led the rebels during the standoff with Pakistan’s security forces, and who declared he would rather die than surrender.
He assumed command after Maulana Abdul Aziz, his elder brother and chief prayer leader, was caught trying to escape and wearing a woman’s burka last week.

Ghazi, who hoped that his martyrdom would inspire a revolution, was found dead in the basement.

Parents of children who attended schools at the compound prayed for their safety before discovering…

Only 20 boys were rescued by security forces who launched the final assault on the mosque. Others…were still missing as the military cleared the sprawling compound by nightfall, engaging in gun battles with militants, room by room.

As for the girls, some of whom had stated they were ready to die for their cause, out of their own free will:

About two dozen women and girls dressed in burkas fled from the mosque as the the final assault began. Among them was Umme Hasan, the wife of Maulana Abdul Aziz. The head of the Madrassa Hafza, the seminary for women, she was known for her extreme views and claimed to have trained her students to become suicide bombers.

Mushie, in a no-win situation: either he angers moderates or radicals, there’s no in between.

President Musharraf ordered his troops to enter the mosque after an emergency meeting yesterday and a final attempt to resolve the week-long stand-off failed. Hundreds of special forces stormed the mosque at dawn but did not dislodge the well-entrenched militants until well into the night.
Pakistani officials said that they had done everything to avoid a bloodbath that would have brought worldwide condemnation of General Musharraf’s embattled administration.

Whither Pakistan?

Political analysts believe that a confrontation between the Government and Islamists is now unavoidable. “It is a defining moment for both the country and the nation in the battle against militancy and religious extremism,” said Shireen Mazari, the chairwoman of the Institute for Strategic Studies, based in Islamabad. “There is no going back.”

NPR: Soldiers Storm Mosque in Pakistan, Killing Dozens

NYT [Thanks, Kush]: At Least 40 Militants Dead as Pakistani Military Storms Mosque After Talks Fail Continue reading →

Manish on CNN tonight at 8:25 PM

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I’ve been AWOL for a while due to work and personal reasons, but I wanted to very quickly let you know that Manish will be on CNN at 8:25 PM EST tonight, talking about the 7/11 promotion that requires 7/11 workers in 11 stores to dress up as Apu to help promote the Simpsons movie. We should be blogging this shortly, but for now, here are some links to his coverage of the event: Reminder: CNN tonight, Watch CNN Tuesday night, Meanwhile, over at Racialicious…, Racial Caricature Mart , Step’n Dispense It (updated again) , ‘The Simpsons’ go Bollywood (updated)

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Cheek Swabbing Can Be Fun… Bay Area Mega Drive

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Ultrabrown posted some picts from last weekend’s cheek swab fest in NYC. Vinay Chakravarty and his wife showed up and, as Manish points out, it’s almost weird how much revelry the event managed to create…

Additional events are happening all over the country to help Vinay, Sameer and countless others in the future.

In particular, this weekend, Bay Area volunteers are hosting their MEGA DRIVE spanning over a dozen sites.

So here’s a little game to liven things up & help get the word out — snap a pict or 2 of you and your friends getting your cheeks swabbed and/or holding up your donor cards, send ’em to ME (vinod@vinod.com), and, in the spirit of the Desi Dad project, we’ll post some of our fav mug shots on SM and Ultrabrown alongside these folks –

Continue reading →

Did he or didn’t he?

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An anonymous tipster alerted us via the News tab to a possible racist/scandalous/nebulous slip of Michael Moore’s tongue. I sat through the entire, excruciating 10+ minute video at Breitbart.tv, only to discover that the controversial part is at the end; the video I posted below features the last eleven seconds of the entire segment and contains the relevant moment.


Link: sevenload.com

Well? What do you think? Racist or immature? Mispronounced or intentionally mangled? Or is this much ado about nothing? Comments on Breitbart were hot, heated and divided about whether or not Michael Moore started to channel Apu. What say you?

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The FBI offers employers advice

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The FBI is apparently being proactive in doing its job by laying out specific scenarios on its website that employers can learn from in order to prevent spying and generally help keep our nation safe (via Wired). Here is one fearful scenario:

You hire a foreign-born engineer who has been educated in this country. Over a 10-15 year period, she rises to mid-level management. Then, she returns to her home country—where she gets paid by that government to set up a business that competes with yours.

The key there is “foreign-born.” It doesn’t matter if you have been educated in this country from an early age or even if you are a Greencard holder. If you are foreign-born then employers should watch out for you because you may sell good Americans out to your Motherland. That’s scary. If I was an employer I might instead hire someone that looks American…just to be safe. Here is another one:

A series of university students and professors from overseas take jobs in research labs on campus and get involved in related military projects. Individually, they learn only bits and pieces. But collectively, when they pass that information back to their home country, it paints a telling picture of our country’s defense initiatives.

Good advice. The next time I see a group of “FOBs” eating lunch together I am going to consider them a “collective.” But wait, what if someone thinks that I’m foreign born when they see me sitting with a group of other desis at school! Qué Malo!

The FBI is willing to help by offering a training program (or something) to spot these collectives, or sleeper cells, or whatever…

Specifically: Join our Counterintelligence Domain Program or our Research and Technology Protection program.

Amazing what helpful advice you find on websites paid for by your tax dollars. I hope no foreign born readers visit Sepia Mutiny. Individually they can’t do us any harm but collectively they could use the knowledge they gain here to paint a telling picture of how we operate and then make the blogs of their own countries better. Continue reading →

Washington, D.C. <3 Vinay...at TANA *and* Tony + Joe's Tomorrow

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Mmmm, lemon rice from Minerva.jpg

I’m so passionate about telling you to get out to popped-collar-ville tomorrow evening, for the next marrow donor drive in DC, I decided to split my original “Best and Worst of Our Community” post in two, because I didn’t want the details for such an important event to be hidden under “the fold”.

If you are in DC and you have not registered yet– please come by because time is precious. I learned this weekend that if you register online or at your local center, it takes weeks to process your swabs; if you come to one of Vinay’s drives, they overnight everything to the database under his name and processing is expedited. Please, please, please register to be a committed donor.

TiE Seattle disappointed me, but I’d rather focus on the best of what our community can do, because the one thing I’m trying to learn from Vinay is relentless positivity.

First off, a huge thank you to mutineer Seema, who registered people at TANA this weekend until her feet ached. A few of our readers pitched in to help flyer, explain and swab– and I got to witness it.

I’ve never been happier to be a part of this sepia-colored space. Part of my sadness over my “second post” was inspired by what I saw at TANA— people were going without food, standing for hours, bravely facing rejection and apathy…and they did it with a smile on their face and faith in their hearts that it is just a matter of time before we find the one. With such memories playing on my internal plasma, how can I NOT cringe at those who would decline to do far less than what I saw all of you do. Together, you made sure a few hundred more people were added to the database and that deserves to be applauded.

Not all of us are Telugu, so I know plenty of you chocolate city citizens didn’t get to come on down and get swabbed– have no fear, happy hour is here! I heard about the following event at Subcontinental Drift, but have been too busy to post it before. I’m sorry about that because it’s going to be good fun for a great cause:

Join us for a Happy Hour and Show your Support!
Register as a Bone Marrow Donor!
Tuesday, July 10th, 5:30 – 9 pm
Tony & Joe’s Seafood Restaurant (Upstairs Lounge) at Georgetown Washington Harbor
3000 K Street Northwest Washington, DC, 20007
RSVP encouraged: dcdonordrive@aol.com
Drink specials if you register as a donor!!
Already registered? Come to show your support! Everyone welcome!
$7 suggested charitable donation to marrow donor recruitment.

Ultrabrown said (with a twinge of guilt) that the NYC mega-event which was held yesterday was SO MUCH FUN. I am certain that gazing at the Kennedy Center while the sun sets, as we toast to life, love and the pursuit of donors won’t be too shabby, either. I’ll be there. Will you? 🙂 Continue reading →

…TiE Seattle Does Not, Unfortunately.

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I was getting ready to post a friendly, pushy reminder about a fantastic event which is taking place tomorrow, in DC at Tony and Joe’s (read: Sequoia ;)– but when I went to Vinay’s excellent website, something else caught my attention.

Something wrong.

All of us have at some point or another, met self righteous folk, very often rich entrepreneurs, who act like they’re God’s gift to the rest of us. Here’s where they become even more obnoxious if you can imagine what that might look like. TiE Seattle approached me last year to do a story on them for a prominent CA Indian paper which I promptly did. I didn’t play any games with them, didn’t dangle them for weeks. They asked, said their story had not been told before, I promptly, gladly did a story on them. Period.

Why not.JPG

Afterward, at every single TiE event I went to, their president (who shares his name with a Bollywood superstar) would drop as I’d be right in the middle of dinner, and demand right away, “So when are you doing another story on us?” At first I thought he was making small talk, then I thought he was just some overeager zealot but then I heard from many people that his malaise was something else. He just suffered from a bad case of pushy Swagger, EGO and a of lack of good manners. So I did what every journalist does. Ignored his prattle and stopped going to TiE Seattle…
I approached TiE asking them if they’d be kind enough to circulate an email to their member base telling them about Vinay and the bone marrow drive for him in Seattle. Just an email. I didn’t ask them for money or anything else. Just an email. 15 days out and what do I get? Zilch. Not even the courtesy of a, “Right now we’re too busy counting our dollars and won’t be able to email our members. Thank you for asking.”
Is it too much to ask to help a dying man? [SeattlePI]

Can I buy a round of WTFs, straight up? I’ve been called some…interesting things on SM these past few days, but maybe one of the trolls should have hurled “naive” my way. How could anyone say no to this cause? I can understand why the blogger, Priyanka Joshi, whom I quoted above, said this:

Corp-Social Responsibility? Hahaha![SeattlePI]

Would it have been THAT difficult to forward Priyanka’s email to their members? Maybe there are good souls in the Seattle chapter who would’ve wanted to help Vinay. It’s a shame that certain people are too…I don’t know what to put here…to help another human being.

Disclaimer for those who need it:

I am not denigrating TiE, its chapters or even its Seattle members. I’m just echoing another bloggers shock and disappointment in whomever decided that a wee email wasn’t important enough to pass on…okay?

I mean, it’s not like I sent the following words heavenwards…

So, in spirit of human dignity, as I pray for Vinay tonight, I’m also saying a prayer for TiE Seattle. “May TiE’s swagger and a lack of concern for other people be replaced by genuine compassion for the rich and the middle class alike.” Amen. [SeattlePI]

…but that’s only because I didn’t think of them, first. Amen. Continue reading →